Our students learn to manipulate with visual markers they create, often relying on trial and error. There are at least two operations on visual markers that create basic knowledge representation: chunking and linking. Chunking deals with structuring information into manageable chunks. Linking deals with defining relationships between chunks and within chunks. Below is a discussion from our Udemy course regarding these visualization manipulations.

The most advanced structure I use is directional graph, something like internet, where everything is linked to everything via some sort of hyperlinks, see e.g.https://www.bighistoryproject.com/bhplive. This is equivalent to reading 2000wpm in structural complexity.

The simplest approach is a linked list, like a story, the order in which the subjects are mentioned. This is equivalent to reading 400wpm in structural complexity.

For the person that graduates from this course, I originally suggested a tree-like structure, where you have markers for each granularity (the whole article, per section in sequence of sections, per paragraph in section and per important fact within paragraph). The linking of the markers should be bi-directional on each level, so you can “walk through” the markers in the original and in the inverse order. This is equivalent to reading 1000wpm in structural complexity.For a simple text this method becomes very similar to mind-mapping. And thus the short answer in the first paragraph.

First you go top down, when you prepare the structure of the document in your head. Then you add up details in bottom-up fashion, correcting missing “branches” as you go. Finally after reading the document you consolidate your knowledge by going top-down and verifying the details you remembered.

In real life I work with connected graphs and Jonathan works with some personalized variation of linked lists, so the mindmapping approach is not really a strong recommendation.